Richard Truly and the death of the Space Exploration Initiative

Adm. Richard Truly, former astronaut and NASA administrator, recently passed away at the age of 86. 

His death has been met with accolades for his accomplishments as a naval aviator and astronaut. But his term as NASA administrator during George H. W. Bush’s presidency was fraught with controversy. Truly was the only NASA chief to have been fired by the president who appointed him.

The sad story of Truly’s term as NASA administrator and his role in the demise of President Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative is recounted in “Mars Wars” by Thor Hogan as part of the NASA History series. It notes that Truly had gotten the job running the space agency almost by default, for being a friend of then White House Chief of Staff John Sununu. 

The Bush administration selected Truly without much discussion or study, based more on his status as an astronaut than any proven administration skills. The decision proved to be a fateful one.

On July 20, 1989, President George H. W. Bush announced the Space Exploration Initiative in front of the National Air and Space Museum with the Apollo 11 astronauts looking on. The initiative would return astronauts to the moon to establish a permanent lunar base and then send a crewed expedition to Mars. Bush proposed the first serious plan to send astronauts beyond low Earth orbit since the Apollo program.

The reaction in Congress and among the American public was unenthusiastic. Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn) reflected the attitude of many in Congress, saying: “By proposing a return to the Moon and a manned base on Mars, with no money, no timetable, and no plan, President Bush offers the country not a challenge to inspire us, but a daydream.” A Gallup Poll taken soon after Bush’s speech suggested that just 27 percent of the American public favored increasing spending on space.

Nevertheless, Truly and NASA were tasked with developing a plan to make President Bush’s plan a reality. NASA released a 90-day study on Nov. 20, 1989. It proposed five reference approaches with a cost ranging from $541 billion to $471 billion. The initiative would have required doubling NASA’s budget and a time frame of 35 years, from 1991 through 2025.

The Bush White House, especially Vice President Dan Quayle, chair of the National Space Council, and Mark Albrecht, its executive director, were aghast. They knew the Space Exploration Initiative was already on thin ice in Congress. A half-trillion-dollar price tag was bound to cause sticker shock.

Truly, for his part, did not comprehend what the problem was. NASA, at the time, did not do anything cheaply. When it tried, bad things could happen. Truly believed that the Challenger accident occurred as much because of inadequate funding as it did poorly designed O-rings. He thought sending astronauts into deep space on a budget would cause disaster.

To make a long story short, the Bush White House distanced itself from the 90-day study and scrambled to find alternatives for executing the initiative. One was embedded in a study on the space program's future by a committee of outside experts led by aerospace executive Norm Augustine.

Out of frustration for what he felt was footdragging by NASA, President Bush fired Truly and replaced him with aerospace executive Dan Goldin, who was receptive to alternate ways of doing things with his “faster, better, cheaper” mantra,

All was for naught. Congress refused to fund the Space Exploration Initiative. One of Bill Clinton’s first actions as president was to cancel the program. The half-trillion-dollar figure poisoned the well for human space exploration for nearly a generation.

It took another abortive attempt at deep space exploration under President George W. Bush and the subsequent election of Donald Trump as president to get a human deep space exploration program off the launch pad.

Trump’s NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, possessed the political acumen and willingness to do things differently to start the process of getting humans back to the moon and on to Mars.

It helped that the rise of commercial space and Elon Musk’s SpaceX had also occurred. But one cannot help but wonder about the opportunity lost because Dick Truly could not look outside the box.

Mark R. Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.